CMD In The News

by Jonathan Rosenblum

The Center for Media and Democracy continues to provide a leading voice nationally and internationally in identifying manipulative PR and propaganda. Here are a few examples of recent media appearances of the Center and its staff:

• CMD Executive Director John Stauber was prominently featured in a July 31, 2006, USA Today article about anti-union, business lobby darling Rick Berman. Berman "obviously has made a very monetarily successful career out of bashing, smearing and attacking environmentalists," John told reporter Jayne O'Donnell. John was also prominently quoted in a Buffalo News investigation of June 25, 2006, outing "Vets for Truth" as a Republican front organization built in the mold of Swift Boat Vets for Freedom.

• Senior Researcher Diane Farsetta continues to be the leading national voice on "fake news," as her report with Research Associate Daniel Price on corporate-sponsored video news releases reverberates through government and the TV news industry. She was interviewed on NPR/Marketplace and in the Washington Post on August 15, 2006, not to mention nationwide via Associated Press wire stories the next day. "We think that the [Federal Communications Commission] investigation is really important because otherwise stations won't take seriously the disclosure laws that are already on the books," she told the Post. The story has had broad local reach, as well, from the Terre Haute Tribune Star and The Courier News of Elgin, IL to tech industry website www.redherring.com, which paraphrased a PR industry executive as saying that the FCC investigation is "a major victory for CMD."

• Research Director Sheldon Rampton was interviewed by Washington Dateline columnist James Crawley on July 11, 2006, about the Pentagon's own television news service that broadcasts in the U.S. as well as abroad. "It really does blur the line between propaganda and news when you have any government agency, but especially the military, producing news that's intended for the general population," Sheldon noted. Sheldon's CMD blog "Haji Girl," about the violent and racist lyrics in a U.S. soldier's song from the front, was picked up as a lead article on www.alternet.org and received some 200 comments.

• Meanwhile, CMD's new wiki-based investigative website on all members of Congress, Congresspedia.org, led by editor Conor Kenny, received prominent mention in the The Hill (July 11, 2006), and the Washington Post (April 26, 2006). CMD cosponsors the site with the Sunlight Foundation.